


long is the road without you here

by brella



Category: The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Heartache, Separation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-13
Updated: 2017-11-13
Packaged: 2019-02-01 20:57:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12712818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brella/pseuds/brella
Summary: Her Grace has displayed a great aptitude for burying her sorrows, masking them with a gentle smile to distract from the pull of the sky on her wandering eyes. But Impa notices. She notices everything.





	long is the road without you here

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mumblingmaria](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mumblingmaria/gifts).



> For Maria, from the "things you said" writing meme: things you said with too many miles between us.

They elect to cross Lanayru Desert on foot. Really, the decision falls to Impa, and she would not have entertained the slightest argument, for it is safer and does not draw attention, and the growing imminence of an attack from Ghirahim is not something it would be prudent to ignore.

An hour's trek across the sands, though she makes every effort to conceal it, Her Grace begins to straggle. Not from tiredness, Impa is sure—she has shown no signs of it yet, always doing as she is told, always complying with little more than a quiet nod—but from something sharper, more immediate. Her Grace has displayed a great aptitude for burying her sorrows, masking them with a gentle smile to distract from the pull of the sky on her wandering eyes. But Impa notices. She notices everything.

They have traveled together enough days now, she supposes, to do away with a degree of deference. Far be it from Impa to presume that the goddess intended them to be friends, but holding Her Grace's struggles at sword's length has come to seem more cruel than respectful. The girl called Zelda in the sky, after all, is still mortal, and still led much of her life as one. And though holes can open in the hearts of gods as well as they do in all else, Impa has learned that few have any desire to speak of it unless prompted, and sometimes not even then.

Still, perhaps this is part of her duty. When Her Grace slows in her wake yet more, craning her neck over her shoulder as if searching for a figure in the dunes, Impa stops walking. The effort to which she must go to contain her amusement when Her Grace, having not yet looked forward, bumps straight into her is worthy of commendation.

"Oh, forgive me, Impa—" Her Grace starts to say, but she quiets when Impa shakes her head, tugging the cloth of her scarf down from her nose and mouth.

"Something troubles you," she says, not unkindly.

Her Grace freezes, caught. Impa would laugh, were it not toeing the line of blasphemy.

"It—it's really nothing," Her Grace stammers out, wringing her hands at her stomach and looking away from Impa and instead at the sand running into her sandals, between her dirty toes.

"That boy," she continues, as evenly as she can muster, jerking her chin in the direction from which they had come. "The one you call Link. He weighs on your mind."

Her Grace flounders for only a moment, but then the strength to deny it seems to elude her. Slowly, she lowers her head, setting her hands over her heart, as if to assuage it, as if to betray the part of her truly weighed upon, such that it may crumble at the slightest touch.

"Yes," she answers, and the oppressive light of the desert sun grants no shadow in which she can hide the twisting of her face in preparation for tears. "I miss him."

Impa nods slowly, and though it feels strange to look upon Her Grace with sympathy, of all things, still she does; she does not hide it.

"That is normal," she tells her. "You were close. Isn't that—"

"It isn't fair to him," Her Grace murmurs, and the hands at her chest curl now into fists, and the line of her brow into a frown almost bitter.

"Beg pardon, Your Grace?"

Her Grace meets her eye then, and Impa is taken aback—a state so intense, so ignited by bitterness and resolve, does not suit those blue mortal eyes. If she did not know better, she would fear her deity's wrath, right then. But she does know better.

"It isn't fair," Her Grace chokes out. As if to emphasize it, a hot gust of wind tears over the sand, the grains burning the back of Impa's neck.

She waits for a moment, for the Earth's agreement to subside, and then sighs.

"Your Grace—and I hope you will forgive my candor—applying such childish terms to your destiny and his is a pointless effort, one that will only serve to exacerbate your despair." She steps forward and, after a moment's deliberation, sets a hand on Her Grace's shoulder, and tries not to feel anything when Her Grace looks up at her with tears streaking her face. "Do not despair, Your Grace. Just as fate has brought you here, so will it bring you to him again. This I know and swear to you."

"Really?" Her Grace whispers, full suddenly of hope that reminds Impa of something she has oft forgotten: though the goddess' blood and soul inhabit this girl's body, she is still a girl, a child, the one called Zelda.

And so Impa lays her other hand on the crown of Zelda's head, and carefully strokes her hair, as comfortingly as she knows how.

"Really," she replies, and in spite of her station, when Zelda smiles, she smiles, too. "In the meantime, you can tell me all about him. I yearn to form an opinion that exceeds the impression he has thus far given."

"Don't be mean!" Her Grace exclaims reproachfully, but there is a note of mirth in the words. After a moment's thought, and after carefully wiping the tears from the edges of her eyes, she lets out a breath, as though she had been holding onto it for a century. "Impa, he—he's my best friend in the whole world. He can be a bit of a goofball, and he's always daydreaming, and he's awfully forgetful. But he's so brave and so kind that I... he—"

She breaks it with a wet and ungainly laugh, one that could pass for a sob if Impa pressed it.

"He always oversleeps," Her Grace says, full of love, as though it is the most beautiful thing ever said about anyone, and Impa chuckles behind her lips, low in her throat, and wonders at the will of Her Grace, at her predilection even now, even after she is gone, for protecting the frailest and most human things: clouds and love and a heart, laid bare, failing to commit to words the feeling that keeps it beating.

She holds Her Grace's hand the rest of the way through the desert, grateful for the stories of the boy she loves, for they fill the emptiness of the wasteland in ways that almost return it to the way Impa remembers. In passing, she swears she sees the full fuchsia petals of an Ancient Flower. But perhaps she had only imagined it.

 

* * *

 

Master Link's slowed and thudding heart rate is what summons Fi from the sword when he lands on one of the sky islands in a storm and does not take shelter from the sheeting rain. She whirls gracefully into view, floating above him, attempting to calculate the grief clutching his face.

"Master Link," she says as the rain batters the earth around them, splashing mud all up his trousers, soaking his hair until the color is dull. "Your morale is at less than forty-five percent. What ails you?"

Master Link lifts his eyes from the horizon and instead looks to her. His features seem suddenly more aged, weathered by trial and loss and the end of innocence. Fi does not have a heart with which to feel pain. Her Grace had not made her one. Her attempts to quantify the sorrow in her master's eyes return only scrambled data she cannot parse. But she recalls how he had stilled in the waters of the Earth Spring at Eldin Volcano's summit, how the words of the goddess' servant had cut at him so deeply that even she had felt the edge of the wound, all through her being. She recalls how his human heart had leapt at the sight of Her Grace's mortal form, the one he knows as Zelda; and how it had all but stopped at the loss of her, when she had not spoken to him, when she had turned away from him without even uttering his name.

"Master Link," she repeats now, "what ails you?"

Her master looks back at her, wearier now than she has ever seen. He does not say anything. He never does. But Fi understands.


End file.
